Sunday, January 23, 2011

When the levee breaks 2011


“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
- Buddha

Because I had a business meeting on Saturday, January 15th, Lone and I took advantage of the opportunity and spent Friday night in São Paulo -after delivering Fazenda Alfheim's beyond organic piglets to our restaurant customers. We dined at Lorena, 1989, with its head chef, Léo Botto. Delicious food and genial company. Lorena, 1989 will join the ranks of Fazenda Alfheim's customers in Q2, when we raise our piglet production to the next quantitative level. In the meantime, Léo graciously agreed to have his restaurant serve as a distribution center for our raw, organic honey. Therefore, all of you who are interested in purchasing 1, 2, 3 or more jars can do so by depositing money in our bank account and then retrieve them up at the restaurant, which I can also highly recommend as one of the premier dining spots in São Paulo. Well worth a visit.

In the meantime, for those of you looking to enjoy Fazenda Alfheim's Porchetta "Orgânica", I encourage you to visit Felice & Maria, Massimo Ferrari's enchanting rotisseria, which offers cozinha italiana casalinga, in Vila Olímpia.

When Lone and I returned to Fazenda Alfheim, we were met with a wet surprise: the stone bridge on our property was overrun with water, so much so that we decided to park our Mitsubishi L200 Triton HPE 3.2 Diesel and walk the final kilometer in the pouring rain to the main house, where Esben and his girlfriend, Camila, were looking after the fazenda. Esben, Camila and I returned a couple of hours later when the water had subsided and drove the pickup to the main house.

On Sunday, the bridge in front of the fazenda collapsed again, less than a week after it had been repaired, so on Monday we had no choice but to leave Alfheim via Bairro Alto and Posso Alto to Rodovia dos Tamoios to drop Camila and I off at the bus terminal in Taubaté. We ended up getting stuck at one point where part of the hillside had collapsed, depositing a mammoth amount of mud in the middle of what was already a poorly-maintained road. I was unable to rock the Mitsubishi loose, so I had no choice but to grab my belt from my travel bag, strap it on to keep my bermudas from falling down, and start running back to Alfheim to get help. Seven kilometers later…I arrived. Esben met me in front of the house, and I explained the situation. In his unflappable manner, he asked me to hump a 50 kg sack of corn up to the Mato Grosso do Sul piglets while he finished a couple of tasks. We asked João to join us, and he gathered the requisite hoes and shovels and started marching (he informed us that the brakes on his motorcycle did not work) to the pickup at a pace that would have run a British Special Forces lifer ragged. So while Esben drove the tractor, I tried to keep up with João while he tore through the kilometers like a Mini-Me version of John Henry.

Once we arrived, we quickly unstuck the Mitsubishi with the help of our fantastic Lego tractor (a genuine Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer moment for the little tractor that could) and continued on our way, though the road was treacherous: it took us three and one-half hours to reach Paraibuna, normally a one and one-half hour journey.

On the way we met the Mayor of Natividade da Serra, so we stopped and gave him a status report. It seems our joint meeting with the Promotoria de Justiça de Paraibuna a couple of weeks back had a real impact because the bridge was repaired that same day.

When we arrived in Taubaté, Lone dropped us off at the bus terminal, where she picked up Amanda Moropoulos (more action shots to follow shortly), the first of our four Q1/Q2 volunteers. Fortunately, we were able to text Amanda and let her know that we would be arriving late…very late in point of fact. Under the banner of all is well that ends well, I suppose we would have to say that the day was a success. An adventure...but also a success.

Finally, I would be remiss if I wrapped up without informing all of my readers that none other than that bastion of scientific rigor CNNGo has proven that Brazilians are the world's coolest nationality. So while Denmark might rank as one of the two happiest places on earth, the Danes themselves do not impress as hipsters…sorry Lone.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Once was lost, but now am found


"In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true."
- Buddha

In addition to a collapsing bridge, 2011 started with a prison break of sorts. The 35 pigs we recently purchased from Mato Grosso do Sul disappeared…actually disappeared, vanished, absconded …for four days! Up until that point, they had routinely marched to the top of pasture 6, where the fencing is incomplete, i.e. missing additional mesh, and roamed to their hearts' content; however, they always returned in the afternoon around feeding time. Not this time. Interestingly not one of the 35 pigs stayed behind. All for one and one for all, I guess.

I spent half of Saturday searching far and wide, high and low to no avail. Needless to say this created a seriously deflated tone at Fazenda Alfheim. More than the lost investment, their loss would have set back significantly our efforts to increase our piglet supply to meet market demand. Given the gravity of the situation, Esben and I agreed that he and Clair would make a major effort on Monday to find and retrieve our wayward band.

Long story short, Esben and Clair found the pigs camped out at our neighbor's fazenda. Once discovered, they dutifully followed their apprehenders back home, where they were promptly locked up in the crazy ward, a highly secure pen, where we recently kept one of the sows who had a tendency to snack on her neighbor sow's piglets, a female Fat Bastard, if you will: " I'm bigger than you and higher up the food chain. Get in my belly."

All's well that ends well, but that was quite a scare. Needless to say we have done everything possible to accelerate the delivery of more mesh fencing, but the factory only recommenced production on January 10th. If all goes according to plan, and when does that ever happen, we will receive the fencing on Friday, January 14th.

In addition to his channeling his inner Elliot Ness, Esben, again together with Clair (João is on vacation until the second half of January, when Clair and Rosana will take two weeks of their 30-day vacation) also managed to harvest our crop of beans. They are now drying and we will weigh them in a week's time. This represents a milestone of sorts as it is the first real feed we have grown ourselves. Our corn harvest will follow in the months ahead.

On another positive note, we have had the pleasure of a visit from the volunteens, our moniker for Pierre and Sophie Deram's lovely children, Victor and Emilie. They have been a delight: hard-working, helpful, uncomplicated and polite. They will be sorely missed…but are, of course, welcome back anytime dad and mom need a break.

Continuing in the volunteer vein, we are gearing up for a busy period: four volunteers, three from US, Amanda, Jamie and Julie, and one from UK, Danni, who studied with Esben at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, will be spending all or part of the next five months at Fazenda Alfheim. Should be fun.

Fun, too, was this week's first-time visit from Kenny and Sara Geld, along with two of their duaghters, Erin (standing) and Camila (sitting in front of Esben).

Lone's raw, organic honey continues to win market share, one jar at a time. We are currently working on packaging and labeling…very exciting!

Finally, an excerpt from Buffett, Gates and The Story of Enough, a blog post written by Woody Tasch, the founder of Slow Money, an NGO that is catalyzing the flow of investment capital to local food systems.
In the 20th century, our food and our money became fast. Our farms became factories. The erosion of our soil accelerated, as did the erosion of our sense of connection to one another and our sense of collective purpose. Our money zoomed around the planet with ever accelerating speed, increasingly complex and abstract. We raised children who thought that food came from supermarkets and investors who thought that investments came from computer screens. We filled our land with chemicals, our portfolios with zeros and our heads with financial speculation. (“What will be the stock price of McDonalds on the day of the 10 billionth person?”) We ignored the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico—not the one caused by BP’s oil, but the one caused over decades by billions of tons of agricultural run-off coming down the Mississippi River.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Abundant was its honey

Written to iTunes Live from SoHo by Counting Crows

"Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship."
- Buddha

As with every year-end, the unfolding of 2011 was memorable for many reasons, but among all of the highlights, our New Year's Eve visit to Picinguaba and Lone's first full-scale honey harvest stood out, infectious in their effervescence.

Lone, Johannes, his friend Gabriel and I, wrapped up 2010 by visiting our friends Jeff and Suzanna in Picinguaba, where we met some of their friends, Nigel and Michelle Noyes, and at last had the pleasure of meeting Emmanuel Cabale's wife, and ever-so-briefly their son and daughter.

Over the years, we have celebrated New Year's Eve on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro and Natal, at Márcio and Heather Magano's wonderful guest house, Capela, and, of course, at Fazenda Alfheim. New Year 2 0 1 1 on the beach in Picinguaba was at once both intimate and grand in an intensely communal way. And as always, Brazilians demonstrated their unique ability to generate and transmit an intensely unstrained and genuine sense of joy.

After the fireworks, Lone and I retired early and, like good farmers, rose early for a quick swim before heading back to the guest house for a simple breakfast, after which we departed for Fazenda Alfheim with Johannes and Gabriel.

Esben and Pelle chose to spend the New Year with friends at Kenny and Sara Geld's fazenda. It deserves mentioning that Carson and Ellen Geld, Kenny's parents, celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on January 6th, Epiphany, also Pelle's 21st birthday! Our youngest son certainly keeps excellent company, both figuratively and literally.

Back at Fazenda Alfheim, Lone, aided greatly by Johannes, Esben, Pelle and Jemma, and, of course, Rosana, set about harvesting over 70 kg of piercingly golden honey. With Esben and Pelle providing the muscle, Lone put her new centrifuge and honey-making equipment to good use. Needless to say, our doors are again open for anyone who wants to purchase Alfheim's own nectar of the gods.

Finally, we reached an agreement with the Prefeitura de Natividade da Serra and the Promotoria de Justiça de Paraibuna regarding maintenance of the estrada municipal…and not a moment too soon. After celebrating the signature of a compromise agreement comprising four concrete improvements, including replacing the bridge in front of our fazenda with a metal bridge in Q2 2011, Lone returned home just in time to find, ironically, that that self-same bridge had collapsed, perhaps in exasperation, and even our Mitsubishi L200 Triton HPE 3.2 Diesel could not cross it and enter Fazenda Alfheim. After Esben and Pelle carried 10 sacks of corn across the bridge and loaded them onto our Lego tractor, they left the car parked discreetly on the estrada municipal. Unfortunately, some candango chose to vandalize the vehicle, breaking a window and turning the lights on to drain the battery. An unfortunate exclamation point to an otherwise spectacular end and a beginning, but certainly insufficient malevolence to dampen all of the positive energy that the preceding days had generated.

Bem-vindo 2011! And não bem-vindo 'Enviropigs'!